Mistakes
by Eurgh
Summary: I have made mistakes. I know this. I have known it most of my adult life. Magneto, one-shot, reflections, R&R please!


**Hello! Just a one-shot, from Magneto's perspective. **

**Mistakes**

I have made mistakes.

I know this. I have known it most of my adult life.

How can one not, especially in a situation such as my own?

Perhaps I should feel no self-pity.

It is for the weak, and I am anything but that.

I am alive, when others have fallen.

I can fight, while others can only watch their past flicker through their minds again and again.

My mistakes, one may ask?

I have betrayed both my children.

I have married a woman I could not love, and forced tears at her death.

I stood by and watched my eldest daughter, my first, consumed by flames.

Just as I stood by, dumbfounded, as my mother disappeared from my sight.

Headed for the crematorium.

Headed to be consumed by flames as well.

One could say flames are a recurring theme in my life.

Just as I stood by and watched in horror as the gray uniformed SS soldier struck my father endlessly.

Do I deserve the lonely fate I have carved for myself?

Very much.

And I like to think I would do it all this way again, though I know I would not.

Normal could not exist after the war.

After the camps.

After the horror of watching my brethren disappear as smoke into the sky.

After the death of my God.

I am ancient, tired.

In the beginning, after Buchenwald was liberated, I stayed in the camp for six weeks. Why, one might demand. Why stay where demons will haunt you and death will creep upon you?

Where, then, should I have gone?

To see the home of my childhood, inhabited by the monsters that ordered our execution?

To Palestine, to face more war and fighting and death?

Better to stay with the dead, whom are silent.

Better to stay with the demons, whom will at least leave me to a semblance of peace.

During this time, I reflected upon life and myself. I wanted to search for a spark of anger, a spark seeking revenge, within myself. And I found none; I did not wish to harm my captors. I wished to eat. I wished to mourn. I wished to weep.

I could do none of these things.

Why had I been granted life, when my father had been sent to death? Why had I been allowed to live, while my mother's ashes still floated in the sky? Why me, among the millions of Jews, why had I survived?

I could not fathom a reason.

God, I knew by then, was dead.

Or perhaps never true.

He had died in the flames of the first night. He was no longer there when I watched the living thrown to the dead. He did not mean anything once I saw men murder their fathers for a crust of bread, strike their brothers for water. Why should He be allowed to survive, if none of us should?

God's chosen people.

Perhaps, chosen for suffering. Chosen to face prejudice and hate. Chosen to stand against Hitler, whom they had no chance of defeating. Chosen to be forgotten in the ashes.

I will admit that I am still very much trapped in this time of my life, trapped in a mourning I cannot escape. Is this why I metaphorically donned the gray uniform of the SS? Why I have become the tormentor, and my own tormentors the victims?

I claim to do these things to protect others from prejudice. In a way, this is true. I do not wish to see those of my race persecuted for a minor genetic quirk.

I have darker meanings to my actions.

Humanity has not learned from its mistakes. It will not listen to the calls of its past. Instead, it continues to persecute and murder. It will never allow what is not of the norm. The norm may expand, but at the cost of millions of innocent lives.

To be victorious, I have become that which I hate.

What choice had I? To lie, and pretend to move on? To pretend to love and laugh and be merry? To act as if I was so very grateful to have been spared, when I continuously wished I had been brave enough to face death?

This path has allowed me to hold on to my hate. I know this is a deplorable act in your eyes; in humanity's eyes. Forgiveness, humanity cries out, forgiveness for those whom trespass against you. Forgiveness?

No.

There is a reason that men cannot change my mind. It is not my stubborn nature, though I am quite sure it contributes. I am not a _normal_ human being. No survivor is. We cannot _be_ normal, because to be so is to forget our past.

I would rather feel hate than nothing at all. I would choose anger over numbness.

Blame me, if you will.

Perhaps I deserve your blame.

I know that the horrors of Auschwitz, of Buchenwald, do not excuse my actions now. I know that I should not cause misery in the lives of others because _I_ cannot pass something as innocent as a chimney without a pang of fear striking through my chest. I know that my actions have caused agony for many families, my own included.

Perhaps I even regret it.

My daughter did not deserve the life I thrust upon her, desperate in my hunt for power. So desperate, I would rather one of the two things I have left to love in the world suffer than to see my goals unrealized. My son, the remaining love, has been forced into a role he would not have chosen for himself.

Do I regret it?

At times.

I have made many, many mistakes.

At times, I regret them.

Others, I relish in them.

You cannot understand me, understand this mind that turns and turns and somehow stays fixed in the horrifying times of a sixteen year old boy.

You cannot understand my refusal to move on, to forgive, to forget.

How could you?

I fight now for a persecuted race.

I fight now to stop another Holocaust, this time of those with gifts that should have been celebrated.

I fight the enemies of my past in a time when they have already faced punishment.

I tear apart families, murder the innocent, and cause destruction.

Yes, I have made more mistakes than you will ever know.


End file.
